The Call of Cthulhu
| "The Call of Cthulhu" | |
|---|---|
| Short story by H. P. Lovecraft | |
 Title page of "The Call of Cthulhu" as it appeared in Weird Tales, February 1928. Illustration by Hugh Doak Rankin.[1] | |
 Text available at Wikisource | |
| Country | United States of America |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Cosmic horror |
| Publication | |
| Published in | Weird Tales |
| Media type | |
| Publication date | February 1928 |
"The Call of Cthulhu" is a cosmic horror short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written in the summer of 1926, it was first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in February 1928.[2]
A number of documents left behind by the late Francis Wayland Thurston function as a framework.He was the executor of the estate of his late great-uncle, George Gamell Angell, who was professor emeritus of Semitic languages at Brown University in Providence.The three central documents each form a chapter of the story.
The Horror in Clay
[edit]Thurston has discovered documents relating to an unknown cult and a supernatural being called Cthulhu in his uncle's estate. The documents are accompanied by a bas-relief that Thurston finds repulsive. The relief featured hieroglyphics on its base and a figure enthroned above it, purportedly representing Cthulhu: a spongy, tentacled head perched atop a grotesque, scaly body with rudimentary wings. This had been created by an artist named Henry Anthony Wilcox, who had been experiencing disturbing dreams of Cthulhu and his city of R'lyeh for several weeks and was now hoping that Professor Angell would interpret the meaning of the characters.He informs the professor that, following an earthquake, he had a disturbing dream of large cyclopean cities whose houses were covered with the same hieroglyphs as on the relief. Professor Angell, satisfied with Wilcox's sincerity, requests regular updates on his dreams.
However, after a period, contact with Wilcox abruptly ceases, and his family informs the professor that he is experiencing a fever. During this time, Wilcox continues to speak of a nameless monster, leading the professor to conclude that it is the figure on the relief. After Professor Angell has convinced himself of Wilcox's sincerity, he asks the artist for regular reports on his dreams. After some time, contact with Wilcox suddenly breaks off and the professor learns from his family that he is suffering from some kind of fever. During this time, he keeps talking about a nameless monster and the professor realises that it is the figure on the relief. Nine days later, Wilcox has recovered, but is no longer of any help to the professor. As the professor investigates further, he realises that strange events have been taking place all over the world during the time Wilcox has been ill.
The Tale of Inspector Legrasse
[edit]Angell's estate also contains a report on an archaeological conference attended by John Raymond Legrasse, a police inspector from New Orleans. He reports how he excavated a cruel voodoo cult in Louisiana and found an artefact similar to the one Wilcox had created. As Legrasse is unable to culturally classify this artefact, he now asks the professor for advice. During his investigations, Legrasse had come across an old man called Castro and had learnt during an interrogation that the followers of this cult worship a being called Cthulhu. Of the assembled archaeologists, only Professor William Channing Webb has anything to contribute. He reports on an expedition to Greenland during which he also came across followers of this cult.
When comparing the oral rituals, Legrasse and Webb discovered that they matched. The words sung were the phrase ‘Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn’, which means something like: ‘In his house in R'lyeh, the dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.’ Thurston becomes increasingly interested in this Cthulhu cult and daydreams of glory by researching its origins and connections. He visits Legrasse in New Orleans and meets Wilcox, of whose honesty he is now convinced. As he no longer believes that his great-uncle died of natural causes, he begins to worry about what might happen to him, as he already knows a great deal.
The Madness from the Sea
[edit]Thurston reports how he comes across an Australian newspaper article from 18 April 1925. It is about a mysterious voyage in the Pacific at the same time as Wilcox is plagued by dreams and has created the Cthulhu bas-relief. Thurston takes the diary of the only survivor of this voyage, the Norwegian Gustaf Johanson, who has since died. In it, Johanson recounts a battle against followers of the cult in which his ship, the Emma, sank. However, Johanson and his crew managed to board the attackers' ship and defeat them. They then came across an uncharted island at 47°9‘ south latitude and 123°42’ west longitude, which Thurston is convinced is R'lyeh. As the men explore the island, they inadvertently wake the sleeping Cthulhu.
Panicked, the men try to flee, but all but Johanson and another sailor named Briden are killed by Cthulhu. When Johanson realises that Cthulhu is following them into the sea, he turns the ship around and drives at full speed towards Cthulhu. The impact causes Cthulhu to disintegrate into a green mist, which returns to its original form after Johanson escapes. After reading all this, Thurston wrote this report, summarising his findings about Cthulhu and his cult. He is now certain that, like his great-uncle Angell, he does not have long to live, as the Cthulhu cult continues to exist and he knows too much about it.
Inspiration
[edit]The first seed of the story's first chapter The Horror in Clay came from one of Lovecraft's own dreams he had in 1919,[3] which he described briefly in two different letters sent to his friend Rheinhart Kleiner on May 21 and December 14, 1920. In the dream, Lovecraft is visiting an antiquity museum in Providence, attempting to convince the aged curator there to buy an odd bas-relief Lovecraft himself had sculpted. The curator initially scoffs at him for trying to sell something that was recently made to a museum of antique objects. Lovecraft then remembers himself answering the curator:
Why do you say that this thing is new? The dreams of men are older than brooding Egypt or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon, and this was fashioned in my dreams.
This can be compared to what the character of Henry Anthony Wilcox tells the main character's uncle while showing him his sculpted bas-relief for help in reading hieroglyphs on it which came through Wilcox's own fantastical dreams:
It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon.
Lovecraft then used this for a brief synopsis of a new story outlined in his own Commonplace Book at first in August 1925, which developed organically out of the idea of what the bas-relief in the dream actually might have depicted. In a footnote for his writing down of his own dream, Lovecraft then finished with the suggestion "Add good development & describe nature of bas-relief" to himself for future reference.[4]
Cthulhu Mythos scholar Robert M. Price claims the irregular sonnet "The Kraken",[5] published in 1830 by Alfred Tennyson, was a major inspiration, since both reference a huge aquatic creature sleeping for an eternity at the bottom of the ocean and destined to emerge from its slumber in an apocalyptic age.[6]
S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz cited other literary inspirations: Guy de Maupassant's "The Horla" (1887), which Lovecraft described in Supernatural Horror in Literature as concerning "an invisible being who...sways the minds of others, and seems to be the vanguard of a horde of extraterrestrial organisms arrived on Earth to subjugate and overwhelm mankind"; and Arthur Machen's "The Novel of the Black Seal" (1895), which uses the same method of piecing together of disassociated knowledge (including a random newspaper clipping) to reveal the survival of a horrific ancient being.[7]
It is also assumed he got inspiration from William Scott-Elliot's The Story of Atlantis (1896) and The Lost Lemuria (1904), which Lovecraft read in 1926 shortly before he started to work on the story.[8]
Price also notes that Lovecraft admired the work of Lord Dunsany, who wrote The Gods of Pegana (1905), which depicts a god constantly lulled to sleep to avoid the consequences of its reawakening. Another Dunsany work cited by Price is A Shop in Go-by Street (1919), which stated "the heaven of the gods who sleep", and "unhappy are they that hear some old god speak while he sleeps being still deep in slumber".[9][10]
The "slight earthquake" mentioned in the story is likely the 1925 Charlevoix–Kamouraska earthquake.[11]
S.T. Joshi has also cited A. Merritt's novella The Moon Pool (1918) which Lovecraft 'frequently rhapsodied about'. Joshi says that 'Merritt's mention of a "moon-door" that, when tilted, leads the characters into a lower region of wonder and horror seems similar to the huge door whose inadvertent opening by the sailors causes Cthulhu to emerge from R'lyeh'.[12]
Edward Guimont has argued that H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds was an influence on "The Call of Cthulhu", citing the thematic similarities of ancient, powerful, but indifferent aliens associated with deities; physical similarities between Cthulhu and the Martians; and the plot detail of a ship ramming an alien in a temporarily successful but ultimately futile gesture.[13]
Literary significance and reception
[edit]Lovecraft regarded the short story as "rather middling—not as bad as the worst, but full of cheap and cumbrous touches". Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright first rejected the story, and only accepted it after writer Donald Wandrei, a friend of Lovecraft's, falsely claimed that Lovecraft was thinking of submitting it elsewhere.[14]
The published story was regarded by Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian) as "a masterpiece, which I am sure will live as one of the highest achievements of literature.... Mr. Lovecraft holds a unique position in the literary world; he has grasped, to all intents, the worlds outside our paltry ken".[15] Lovecraft scholar Peter Cannon regarded the story as "ambitious and complex...a dense and subtle narrative in which the horror gradually builds to cosmic proportions", adding "one of [Lovecraft's] bleakest fictional expressions of man's insignificant place in the universe".[16]
French novelist Michel Houellebecq, in his book H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, described the story as the first of Lovecraft's "great texts".[17]
Canadian mathematician Benjamin K. Tippett noted that the phenomena described in Johansen's journal may be interpreted as "observable consequences of a localized bubble of spacetime curvature", and proposed a suitable mathematical model.[18]
E. F. Bleiler has referred to "The Call of Cthulhu" as "a fragmented essay with narrative inclusions".[19]
See also
[edit]Notes
[edit]- ^ "Publication: Weird Tales, February 1928". isfdb.org. ISFDB. Retrieved January 15, 2020.
- ^ Straub, Peter (2005). Lovecraft: Tales. The Library of America. p. 823. ISBN 1-931082-72-3.
- ^ Bruce Sterling (July 4, 2011). "H. P. Lovecraft's Commonplace Book". wired.com. Retrieved April 23, 2020.
- ^ H. P. Lovecraft (July 1994). S. T. Joshi; Will Murray; David E. Schultz (eds.). The H. P. Lovecraft Dream Book. Necronomicon Press. pp. 14–16. ISBN 0940884658.
- ^ The Kraken, The Victorian Web
- ^ Robert M. Price, "The Other Name of Azathoth", introduction to The Cthulhu Cycle. Price credits Philip A. Shreffler with connecting the poem and the story.
- ^ S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, "Call of Cthulhu, The", An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia, pp. 28–29.
- ^ H.P. Lovecraft Archived January 12, 2013, at the Wayback Machine, Fortean Times magazine
- ^ "Lord Dunsany (1878–1957)". Works; Short bibliography. Dunsany. December 2003. Archived from the original on November 30, 2018. Retrieved January 26, 2012.
- ^ Price, "The Other Name of Azathoth". This passage is also believed to have inspired Lovecraft's entity Azathoth, hence the title of Price's essay.
- ^ Lackey, Chris; Fifer, Chad; Leman, Andrew (May 12, 2010). "Episode 42 – The Call of Cthulhu – Part 1". The H. P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast. hppodcraft.com. Archived from the original on August 3, 2021. Retrieved August 17, 2012.
- ^ Joshi, S.T. (2010) I am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft. New York: Hippocampus Press. 2 Vols. Vol II pg. 639
- ^ Guimont, Edward (August 2019), "At the Mountains of Mars: Viewing the Red Planet through a Lovecraftian Lens", Lovecraftian Proceedings No. 3: Papers from Necronomicon Providence 2017, New York: Hippocampus Press, pp. 61–63
- ^ S.T. Joshi, More Annotated Lovecraft, p. 173.
- ^ Quoted in Peter Cannon, "Introduction", More Annotated Lovecraft, p. 7.
- ^ Cannon, pp. 6–7.
- ^ Michel Houellebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life.
- ^ Tippett, Benjamin K. (2012). "Possible Bubbles of Spacetime Curvature in the South Pacific". arXiv:1210.8144 [physics.pop-ph].
- ^ E.F. Bleiler, Supernatural Fiction Writers Vol, NY: Scribners, 1985, p. 478
References
[edit]- Lovecraft, Howard P. (1984) [1928]. "The Call of Cthulhu". In S. T. Joshi (ed.). The Dunwich Horror and Others (9th corrected printing ed.). Sauk City, Wis.: Arkham House. ISBN 0-87054-037-8. Definitive version.
- Lovecraft, Howard P. (1999) [1928]. "The Call of Cthulhu". In S. T. Joshi (ed.). More Annotated Lovecraft (1st ed.). New York: Dell. ISBN 0-440-50875-4. With explanatory footnotes.
- Price, Robert M. (1996) [1928]. "The Call of Cthulhu". In Robert M. Price (ed.). The Cthulhu Cycle: Thirteen Tentacles of Terror (1st ed.). Oakland, Calif.: Chaosium, Inc. ISBN 1-56882-038-0. A collection of works that inspired and were inspired by The Call of Cthulhu, with commentary.
